“As this global role will have a significant impact on our products, team, and strategy,” Benitez wrote in a blog post at Braintree, “John’s 20+ years of experience as a CIO/CTO in the financial services industry driving innovation at scale for multiple teams is a perfect fit for Braintree.” In his new position, Macilwaine will lead product development including engineering, product management design, and production engineering.

Braintree specializes in payment solutions for e-commerce companies ranging from small businesses to large corporations. The company’s platform enables merchants and businesses to accept payments directly, manage an online marketplace, or explore new sales channel opportunities. Braintree prides itself in being “developer-bred” and “technology-led” and emphasizes the ease of integration and wide payment optionality (including PayPal and Venmo) of its technology.

“The two-sided platform that only Braintree and PayPal together can deliver is unmatched and has always stood out to me,” MacIlwaine said. “I’m thrilled to leverage this unique value proposition to continue helping merchants around the world grow and succeed.”

MacIlwaine comes to Braintree from fellow Finovate alum, Lending Club, where he was CTO for more than four years. Before Lending Club, MacIlwaine held executive positions at Green Dot, Visa, Sungard, Envestnet, and Morgan Stanley. He has a BSE in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, where he is a member of the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board at the School of Information.

While the California-based company began testing in-app payments in January, today marks the public launch. Developers can integrate Venmo payments for merchants using Braintree’s API, which charges 3% +$0.30 per transaction. This is a big step up in revenue from what it was bringing in previously. The company’s flagship P2P money transfer service is free for ACH transfers and debit card charges and costs 3% for credit card transactions.

Currently 11 merchants accept Venmo payments:

Munchery

Gametime

Priv

Poshmark

Hop Market

Wish

Parking Panda

Dolly

Urgentli

Boxed

delivery.com

The Venmo checkout experience offers the ability to split and settle a bill and promises to be fast; customers will not need to leave the merchant’s app. As for merchant appeal, Venmo expects a viral lift from its social feed as customers share their purchases. As Venmo says on its website, “Your business just got access to lots of social friends.”

As the Braintree_PayPal developer and startup relations team, Braintree_dev works directly in the field to educate and support the community about the Braintree and PayPal APIs and SDKs. With unique programs including BattleHack, Startup Blueprint and Start Tank, Braintree_dev engages with the community to mentor, support and enable seamless commerce experiences through easy integrations around the globe.

“Make me pay you! – Increasing Checkout Conversion:
Don’t you just wish you can talk to your users ask them to “Show you the money!!” Sometimes your users just want to give you the money but we make it so difficult for them. Increasing check-out conversion, part art, part science, part design, part engineering. I’ll talk through simple design patterns, like making sure you have a way for users to give feedback to engineering libraries (cool libraries that help you take a photo of a credit card instead of entering it’s info). By the end of this talk, I hope you will have found some interesting ways for your users to give you more money.

Key takeaways

Design patterns, tools, tips, tricks and other developer resources you can use to build a
great checkout experience.

Case studies on companies that made changes to their checkout flow that resulted in increase customer revenue.

Examples of great checkout experiences and some not so great checkout experiences that we can learn from.